I remember when I came up with my first idea that I shared with the world.

It was a dating site for people who didn’t want to share photos of themselves, but build text-only connections. I didn’t know what I was doing; I only really knew HTML and CSS at this point. The idea, so esoteric, died on the vine; I often forget about it myself.

Eventually, I found another idea that I thought had real potential. But I had a different reason for building it: Beyond having been laid off, I hated not finishing projects, and I wanted to understand what it would feel like to see something through.

So, I did. That became my site ShortFormBlog. It was a lot of work, and a lot of heart went into it. At the time, there were always new, weird things that emerged online.

This spirit of creation is what gave us interesting sites like Hacker News and Product Hunt, where something new is always on display.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I’ve seen a sudden surge of emails highlighting various new projects, some seemingly personal, some clearly the start of new businesses or viral plays. And I don’t want to take away from that spirit of creation, which has given me so much over the years. But I think there’s a danger in how much AI gets used for these projects. I’m not going to name names, nor attack any one user, but I do want to note that it’s often quite clear, when these projects land on my doorstep, where they come from.

Generally, they start with a message that attempts to flatter my work or highlight just how much of a fit their thing really is with my thing. But when I click in, it’s clear that so much of what’s been built, soup to nuts, is AI. Even the email is AI, which is why it’s so flattering. I’ve been around long enough to know that it’s often not a personal note, but a hustle of sorts.

Unlike in the 2010s, when a new startup pitching a thing felt like a PR email, these messages instead come across as being of the spirit that I created my projects. And given that it’s messaging like a personalized can-do project while actually being a PR email, it has started to bother me.

I haven’t been able to figure out why I’ve been feeling this way about these messages, but a story that blew up over the weekend I think really made it clear.

Did Claude copy an app idea wholesale?

Earlier this year, Terry Godier won a lot of fans among techies for suggesting a new approach to RSS readers, which became his Mac and iOS app Current. He’s continued to build ideas like that, along with an impressive blog, when he ran into a bit of a snag with his latest app, an astronomy app named Dark Hours.

The app was blocked from the App Store after a review, with Apple citing the app’s astrology content, a category it has long banned. Astronomy isn’t astrology, you’re thinking, right? That’s what Daring Fireball’s John Gruber also thought when he wrote a full-throated defense of the app, based in part on a behind-the-scenes conversation with Godier. Turns out, it started as an astrology app, only to become an astronomy app. (Weird leap, right?) That undermined the entire point of Gruber’s post, and led to a rare retraction from Gruber.

If that was all, that’d be one thing. But the app, built with the help of Claude, appeared to be a close copy of another open-source app built with Claude. The creator of the existing project called Godier out, and shit really hit the fan at that point. Godier responded by stopping distribution of his app and encouraging people to use the existing open-source Dark Hours.

Some are skeptical of Godier’s explanation of what happened, given that he appears to have misled Gruber. Godier denies even being aware of the other app, but he used the same name, and the developer shared specific examples of ideas copied from the existing tool. The optics ain’t great.

I’m not going to credit malice, as I’m not close enough to say whether he did anything wrong. But it does dovetail into the problem that I’ve been seeing in my inbox.

When you can’t trust the weekend tinkerer

Technology has long been a space of hustlers, of people who want to impress. By that standard, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are two of the greatest hustlers that ever lived. But my heart has always been with the people just getting started and trying the new thing, as that’s always the mode I’ve seen myself in.

Which is why I’ve been at least mildly optimistic about vibe coding helping make room for new types of creatives. I’ve never liked the “learn to code” gatekeepery stuff and I certainly don’t want to gatekeep people who just want to see an idea through. But there’s clearly a problem when people building new things, going through the steps of launching it and sharing it with the world, can’t even write the email announcing the thing themselves.

I’ve been clear in my views of AI, the bionic arms of it all. I don’t think it’s necessarily dangerous if you’re being honest about what you’re doing and why. But if you’re building a thing, there has to be a point when the tool stops and you begin. I don’t mean that you even have to code the damn thing if you don’t know how; I reject gatekeeping every day of the week and refuse to take a knee-jerk approach to artificial intelligence. (If gatekeeping is bad in one situation, it is bad in every situation.) But I do think it needs to reflect you, your passions, and your creativity.

If the Dark Hours situation is true, and Claude did end up copying an existing open-source project and turning it into an app, the whole idea of whether you created it becomes an open question. But even if it isn’t, an infusion of your own interests and personality go a long way to make that story yours.

That spirit of creation, which got me so excited about the internet when I first got online, is real. Back in 2009, I helped a random site that I thought was interesting but was poorly coded with a redesign, just because I thought it would help make it successful, and because I thought it could bring me traffic. (It did, on both counts. I didn’t ask to be paid for it, I just liked scratching someone else’s back.)

I’m seeing email after email suggesting these users built a thing they’re truly passionate about. But if we can’t trust that this passion is real, legit, and from the heart, we’re in trouble.

Take a step back. Is this thing you built a reflection of you?

Gatekeeping-Free Links

I love it when rare cartridges show up in the wild, and we just had a case of that involving 97 pristine late-era versions of the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cart—the pack-in cart for most U.S.-model Nintendo Entertainment Systems.

I guess we gotta talk about this, too. Hank Green ran into a scandal very similar to the discussion above, when he made it clear (after getting accused of using AI in a script) that he was sometimes using AI for his research. This video is effectively an apology to his team. He likely lost a lot of goodwill over this mess, but given that, it’s a fine apology. Dude is overworked. Let’s all work less and make better stuff.

Today’s reminder to maybe not use random domains for your dummy emails.

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